I recently discovered Zelda Classic, a fascinating project to clone the classic Legend of Zelda game. This is what the original game looks like running in an emulator:
Why does anyone care? Look, it’s just a really cool game, okay?
These programmers created their own game engine and then cloned the original Zelda graphics for use in the game. But the real value-add is being able to create new quests, distribute them for others to play, and download other quests to play in the engine.
The 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is my favorite video game console of all time. I even used to maintain a native Linux NES emulator named TuxNES to help preserve the nostalgia.
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<– Simon vs. the undead fish monsters in Konami’s original Castlevania Link, the hope of Hyrule, takes on the Octoroks in the original Legend of Zelda –> |
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But I love these: Videos showcasing tool-assisted “Time Attacks”. The basic idea is that the people behind the videos use a variety of feature-rich console emulators to get through games very quickly using some very clever methods. Watching a video from start to finish usually lets you relive the experience of playing through the entire game, all in 10-20 minutes, nominally.
The video is encoded with the DivX codec; the frames are each 256×224 at 60 frames/sec (for NTSC games; 50 fps for PAL games). Audio is generally encoded as MP3 audio at 32-64 kbps. As a multimedia freak, I have to admit that it is a little frustrating to watch these videos which are typically encoded with ISO MPEG-4 (under the fourcc DIVX). So I started to wonder if it would be possible to develop a custom codec specifically for coding this type of video, and losslessly.